


Doing Alright

by RemindMeWhoIAm



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Falling In Love, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 03:59:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12124047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RemindMeWhoIAm/pseuds/RemindMeWhoIAm
Summary: Nora tells her story about the Glowing Sea.





	Doing Alright

     Seeing my neighborhood, my home, everything destroyed when I crawled out of the vault was – to make the biggest understatement of the millennium – devastating.  Nothing prepared me for that.  And then Codsworth, _yes, ma’am, you’ve been a frozen TV dinner for a little over 200 years_ , well.  Let’s just say that if I hadn’t had something to hang onto – find that bastard and get my son back – I’d have been pulled under pretty quick. 

     The funny thing was, it wasn’t terrible.  It wasn’t _dead_ , as I learned later he believed.  People were constantly asking me to help rebuild their farms; how can you farm on something dead?  The Commonwealth isn’t pretty to look at, but it’s sick, not dead.  Makes me think of my mother when she came back from chemo the first time, sick and frail and emaciated, but still alive.

     Okay, bad analogy, because my mom did eventually die, but you get my point.  There was potential and it was the little shred of sanity I held onto for months while trying to get to my baby.

     When we hit the edge of the Glowing Sea, a few miles down a broken, empty highway from Somerville, that was the _real_ kick in the face.  There was the emptiness, the death, the destruction.  The Geiger counter in my suit clicked so loudly, just standing at the edge of the blast zone, that two miles in I turned the fucker off.  I needed that information from Virgil and if I was going to get it or die trying.

     Or turn into a ghoul, as Hancock was fond of reminding me could happen.  Which, I figured, wasn’t such a bad deal.  Sure, I’d look pretty messed up, but the fuck does it matter now?  Plus, radiation immunity in a radiation-soaked world sounds like a win-win to me.

     Never told Hancock that, though.  He’d find some way to turn it into _Sunshine, you don’t want this ugly mug_ , but I couldn’t care less and I really mean that.

     Okay, I’d _probably_ miss my hair.  I’m a little vain about it.  But, otherwise…

     Haven’t gotten that lucky, though. 

     The Glowing Sea was this vast, unending landscape of pure destruction.  You know those mini-craters that frag mines leave behind?  That was the Glowing Sea.  A dark, green pit filled with death.  Standing there on the edge of the road, staring into that chasm and thinking that I had to go into it, scared the shit out of me.  Nothing had scared me yet.

     I don’t say that to sound tough – I’m just being honest.  Since the moment I walked across the bridge from Sanctuary and out into the destroyed world, I wasn’t afraid.  I was fucking _pissed_ and once I found out about Med-X, I got high anytime I thought the fear was creeping in.  But I couldn’t very well stop right there and shoot-up before trekking inside, so I had to feel it.

     It was terrifying, the way I couldn’t see the sky or tell which direction we were going.  I never knew if it was day or night and green lightning was constantly flashing overhead.  Hancock strolled straight through the fucking place as if he was walking through a sauna – _all the rads a ghoul could ask for –_ but me, looking totally badass in my pimped-out power armor (thank you, Atom Cats)?  I tiptoed behind him like a damned kid, jumping a little every time I accidentally kicked a rock or caught a flash of lightning in the corner of my visor.

     We got fucking lucky like a pair of drunks in the Tops and didn’t encounter anything scarier than a few ferals and stingwings on the way in, but I was shaking.  If he’d stopped me to ask if I was okay, I probably would have broken down in tears.  Which, I will admit, is a big deal for me.

      It took most of the day to get to the Crater.  We just walked, avoiding anything we could, not stopping until we were standing on the crest of the hill.  I looked down into that crater and just…froze.  The sheer size of it took my breath away and for several minutes I couldn’t think about anything but that explosion.

     The way everything went white for an instant, the sound that made my ears ring.  The heat and ash rolling toward us like a tidal wave.  I held my baby so tight he squealed in protest.  Nate wrapped his arms around me like he could protect us, like he could use his own body to block the utter destruction barreling towards his wife and son.

     When I could see something besides memories again, I looked around and noticed Hancock had started picking his way down the other side of the hill, heading towards what looked like a shanty town at the bottom of the crater.  People lived there, at ground zero, where fire and destruction collided with my world and destroyed it.

     It wasn’t enough to make up for what I had lost.  Nothing would ever be enough to replace what I lost.  But seeing people down there, alive and thriving – if a tad weird – was…I don’t know.  It was like walking out of Vault 111 and seeing my home collapsed and decaying, but with a leafy hubflower bush in the backyard, purple flowers reaching for the sun, strong and green and beautiful in their own way.

     “Doin’ alright, Sunshine?”

     Maybe. 

     Maybe I could do alright in this world.  Why not?

     That night – or maybe day, can’t exactly tell in the Glowing Sea – I fell asleep in some damp corner of Virgil’s cave.  Barely kept my eyes open long enough for Hancock to slip a needle into my arm and get the Rad-Away flowing.  Never did like that stuff, but until I get lucky enough to go ghoul or something, can’t travel without it. 

     I passed out right there on the floor, my head in his lap as if we were old friends or something.  Not for the first time – because living in the post-apocalyptic world is just weird sometimes – but that night…that was different.

     When we both woke up later, I made up some silly story about what I’d been dreaming – Preston and radscorpions or something – and I think he bought it.  I’ve always meant to ask him, but it never came up.  I’m not really sure it matters nowadays, but it still hangs around in the back of my mind.  The dream and whether or not he could tell I was lying about it.

     It was the first dream I’d had since – fuck, even _before_ the world ended – that didn’t make me wake up sweating and trying to catch my breath.  It wasn’t even really a dream – it didn’t have that weird surreal feeling dreams tend to have. 

     In it, I was standing at the top of the hill, looking down into the crater.  I didn’t have my power armor, just my ratty old vault suit.  I could _feel_ the air on my skin – it wasn’t wind or a breeze, but I could feel it.  A warm tingle that crawled along my bare hands and up my spine.  It was weird, almost unpleasant but not completely so.  Green lightning – because everything in the Glowing Sea is fucking _green_ – tore across the sky above me.  I was terrified, standing there, unprotected in a place where even the air was poisonous to me, where the few living things that remained could and would tear me to bits in an instant.

     He was there like he had been in reality earlier.  Hancock, strolling through the fucking place as if it were a walk in the park.  As if the crater where a part of the world ended was just the front gates of Goodneighbor and the deathclaws prowling the edges were no more of a threat than ugly assholes extorting naïve-looking vaulties.  I can never help but kind of admire his confidence, his nonchalance in the face of pretty much anything – and in my dream, it made me ache.

     I don’t know why he came with me.  Why he’d leave Goodneighbor to wander around getting into trouble with some idiot prewar housewife who still barely knew which way was up.  I know I asked him because I needed the help, I needed someone watching my back.  Piper and Preston couldn’t exactly follow me in the Glowing Sea.  Dogmeat couldn’t.  Mac had gone to get his son like he wanted.  Strong didn’t want to travel with me anymore (who knew a _super mutant_ would have standards about things like drug abuse).  I was still trying to figure Nick out at that point – why not invite this random man I knew purely by rumor and maybe ten minutes of awkward flirting?

     I did remember to ask him that one once – why me.  He said he liked covering my ass because it was a fine ass to look at.

     Maybe he’s as clueless as I am.  Maybe it was just a profound case of _fuck it_ and we got fucking lucky. 

     Again. 

     We seem to do that a lot. 

     My mom would have called it divine providence, fate, _meant to be._   I don’t know.  I like the idea; it has a poetic attractiveness I can’t really deny.  But when it comes down to it, I don’t care if it was meant to be or if it was random, coincidental.

     Standing there at the hill over the crater, in my power armor or not, watching him walk down towards the Children of Atom was looking at the hubflower bush again.  It was setting out into the emptiness that was once Concord and finding a best friend past the raiders and the collapsed buildings.  It was the little bit of relief I felt when Dogmeat settled into my lap every evening.

     When I woke up from my dream, I could smell him.  The faint acidity of Jet, the dry dirt, sweat, blood, gun smoke, stale cigarettes.  Things I wouldn’t usually want to smell, but altogether it was this smiling man in the crater who asked me if I was doing alright, who pumped me full of Rad-Away, who liked the curve of my backside in a vault suit, who taught me how to properly use the switchblade I had been carrying around.

     It wasn’t Nate, or some substitute.  Nate was pencil shavings and cheap soap, antiseptic clinging to his lab coat after a shift in his clinicals, the metallic tang of his prosthetic leg. 

     He wasn’t Nate and the Glowing Sea was nothing of the world I abandoned when I stepped onto that vault platform.  I finally figured that bit out in some literal hole in the wall in the middle of nowhere, pumping myself full of anti-radiation drugs to stay alive.

     Not consciously, mind you.  It took a while to get from the back of my mind to the front, but it was there. 

     Realizing that made it okay.  Made me feel less terrified, less like I was going to drown if I stopped to think about it for five seconds.

     Realizing that he wasn’t Nate and this wasn’t my old world made me realize I could love him.  Sappy shit, yes, but what can I say?  I’m as much of a romantic at heart as he is.

     I love Preston like my own flesh and blood.  I love Shaun and Mac and all the people I call _friend_ today.  I love the home I’ve made for myself in the new Commonwealth.  I would never deny that.  But I also know that I’d have never made it out of that place, out of the glowing, radioactive hole where the bomb hit, if he hadn’t been there waltzing through it like he owned it.

     _Doin’ alright, Sunshine?_

**Author's Note:**

> What is this? I have no clue. It sort of just wrote itself while I've been trying to deal with Hurricane Irma and the next chapter of my series. Whatever it is, I hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> Follow my not-always-but-mostly-Fallout ramblings at sociallyacceptablemadness.tumblr.com


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